A Grave in cloudSpace is Free Forever

My short story, A Grave in cloudSpace, is now available on Smashwords for the low, low price of nothing. The price on Amazon remains $0.99, but it is possible that Amazon will “price match” the price down to free soon. You can help move this process along by clicking Amazon’s “tell us about a lower price” link and entering the Smashwords URL in their pop-up form.

Now, I don’t want to turn this blog into a series of treatises on e-book marketing (Lord knows there are enough of those already). But some may still be curious: why make a story free, with no intention of ever charging money for it again? To me it has to do with the current state of e-book pricing. The minimum price for any e-book on Amazon is $0.99, but for a story as short as Grave, I don’t believe that this is a good value for the consumer. This isn’t a knock on Amazon or anyone who posts their work there; it’s simply the reality of dealing with our entrenched, fee-based payment processing infrastructure that makes implementing true micro-transactions impossible.

Grave was a great learning experience for me: it was the first time I dealt with things like proofing and layout, e-book file formats, and programs like KDP Select. I’ve come a long way since then, and of course I still have a very long way to go, which is why I’m glad I can continue to leverage my old stories in order to learn more. In the one day that Grave has been on Smashwords, it’s already been downloaded 39 times, with no promotion whatsoever, and Smashwords is small potatoes compared to Amazon. So far so good, but now it’s time to stop thinking about promotion and go back to writing; or, in this case, editing… ;P